5 Bitcoin Alternatives: Who’s In the Race?

Bitcoin was the first, and still the most popular to date, crypto-currency to begin trading in 2009. It uses advanced cryptography methods to ensure fair distribution and decentralized control. In short, this is money that represents, or is ‘backed,’ by computing power.

Crypto-currency is a great alternative for those looking to keep their wealth outside of fiat currency, and the party is just getting started; Bitcoin is no longer the only viable crypto-option. Here are five Bitcoin alternatives that have a good-looking (if not simply interesting) future on the market.

Litecoin

This crypto-currency is very similar to Bitcoin: they actually operate in exactly the same way. Litecoin has wallet encryption and a healthy block chain network that keeps the currency functioning and expanding.

The only major difference between the two currencies is mining. Litecoin has been coded in a way to accommodate the ‘regular user,’ or someone who doesn’t have thousands to blow on the Godzilla computers required for mining BItcoin. If the price Bitcoin is too high for you, or you’re looking to test the waters of mining, Litecoin is a good choice.

Peercoin

As you may have seen in the news, crypto-currencies are not perfect. Although anonymous by nature, it still is possible for large organizations, like the government, to brute-force their way in. There’s little you can do when a group decides to employ enough hardware to takeover the network.

Or is there?

Peercoin attempts to tackle this problem with their proof-of-stake and proof-of-work combined algorithm. This proprietary algorithm makes Peercoin attacks more trouble than they’re worth, and makes this crypto-currency the most stable of the bunch.

Namecoin

The guys behind this currency are real innovators. This currency is also based on Bitcoin, but with one significant difference: it’s also used as an alternative, decentralized DNS system. Each hash, or fraction of a currency, mined on the Namecoin block-chain doubles as part of a domain name.

Stablecoin

It sounds like Bitcoin. It acts like Bitcoin. Stablecoin is exactly like Bitcoin. So why use it? For starters, diversification is never a bad thing; these coins can be mined alongside Bitcoins allowing you to diversify your crypto-currency holdings.

There’s also the huge advantage of coin mixing, made simple by the Stablecoin platform. With the growth of Crypto currencies malicious groups have begun to spend significant resources on exploiting Bitcoin and cracking its anonymity, and there’s no better way to maintain your Bitcoin anonymity than to mix them with other currencies. Wish hackers good luck as they try to decrypt a mixed currency, it really isn’t easy. As if cracking Bitcoin hashes is easy in the first place.

QuarkCoin

What’s safer than the hashing process that’s used to encrypt a crypto-currency? Nine of them. Couple that with the fact that the hashing processes originate from six unique algorithms, and you get a really secure currency. You get Quarkcoin.

Everything else is exactly the same. Everyone has a private wallet and a block-chain is implemented to keep the currency decentralized. It’s Bitcoin with nine layers of security.